My husband and I did the unthinkable in 2020, we did our first family trip to Disney & Universal during the height of the pandemic. Some thought we were crazy, but we just couldn’t pass up all the great prices!
We will most likely never be able to do this trip as cheap again, and I love budget travel! We found such great flight prices that we decided to fly instead of making the long drive in from Texas. We got a super cheap rental car for the week and a great price on a two bedroom suite at Universal’s Endless Summer Resort, which is their budget hotel on property.
We opted for this hotel because staying at a hotel on Disney property is just really pricy. And while there are TONS of hotels to choose from in Orlando, we really liked the idea of being on site of one of the parks we were visiting so that we could enjoy the amenities and proximity that you get with this option. Plus, Endless Summer Resort was fantastic for the price! Since we have a family of 5, we loved that no one had to sleep on an air mattress. The two bedroom suites have two queen sized beds in one room, and a king sized bed for the parents in another room. Plus, they have a great little kitchenette with a full sized table. The hotel was so clean and my kids really loved the giant fish shaped swimming pool.
We were there in early November, which in my opinion was the PERFECT time to be there. The weather was great, not too hot to be out walking at the parks all day, but not too cold to enjoy the pool and water rides. It was still warm enough to swim at night!
Plus, since most kids were in school at that time, the crowds weren’t too bad. However, there were still plenty of crowds, even during the pandemic. Universal still did an amazing job of keeping things safe in spite of Covid-19. They took our temperatures every day and gave us a wrist band if we were clear. Then we could just show our band at the entrance of Universal or to get back into the hotel. At the Universal parks, they had us wear masks and pumped hand sanitizer into our hands before every ride. Plus they were really great about enforcing social distancing in the lines and on the rides.
We arrived in Orlando on a Sunday and then had 5 full weekdays to spend there, and then left on the following Saturday. This allowed us to avoid the weekend crowds at the parks. We opted for the Universal Park Hopper Pass, which allowed us to go between the two Universal parks anytime and ride the Hogwarts Express, which goes back and forth between these two parks.
There are three parks within Universal Studios; Universal Studio Resort, Islands of Adventure, and Volcano Bay. Volcano Bay is a water park and was already closed for the season. We spent Monday at Universal Studio Resort. Universal does not have a park reservation system to limit their capacity, it’s just first come, first serve, so arrive early!
We had breakfast at the cafe in our hotel most days (very good food!) and grabbed some Starbucks (also in our hotel☕😁) and headed over to Universal Studios for the day. The big benefit of staying at a Universal resort is that we can get into the park an hour early and we can take a shuttle over there (which saves us $28 a day in parking and delivers us at the entrance). We purchased a dining plan that included one meal and two snacks. I felt this was a good value after checking prices, and we enjoyed not having to stress over the cost of every snack and treat the kids wanted, we could just get them! We rode tons of rides, watched some outdoor shows (some shows that are normally indoor have been moved out), ate lunch at Mel’s Diner (was pretty good but not great), took a walk through Springfield, and went to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter!
We bought the kids all their own wands at Ollivanders Fine Wands that were matched by their personality, and the wands are interactive throughout the Harry Potter areas of the Universal Studios and Island of Adventure. They were pretty pricy at about $55 a wand, but it really added to the experience and made a great souvenir to take home so I did not regret the purchase. If you are going to purchase one, be sure to get it on your first day there because it works at both Hogsmeade and Diagon Alley.
We spent Tuesday at Disney’s Magic Kingdom park at Disneyworld. We were excited to see all the Christmas decorations already up! Christmas decorations make this place even more magical. Currently, Disney has a park reservation system to buy tickets in advance. They do sell out so buy your tickets in advance, and forget about finding discount tickets. I wasted lots of time looking for them to no avail. Disney was not offering dining plans at the time of our trip due to Covid and are not yet available.
We arrived right at opening and ran directly over to Space Mountain since this is probably the most popular ride. We had a short wait and my kids LOVED this classic ride. We then started riding all the rides in the Tomorrowland area and worked our way around the park in a counterclockwise direction. This was a good plan to keep the walking to a minimum. I have to say, honestly the lines were very long for the majority of rides. The Fastpass was not available at this time to reserve our place in line, which is a feature that Disneyworld normally offers. It is still unknown at the time of this article when they will have the staffing available again to offer this feature. The park was at a reduced capacity so you would think that lines would be short, but this was not the case. The rides are also at a reduced capacity at both Disney and Universal to allow for social distancing, which meant that the wait times were still fairly long. My 6 year old especially had a difficult time with all the waiting and got fussy on us a few times. Plus, the shows, character encounters, and fireworks were all cancelled with the exception of a parade float that periodically came through with some characters on them waving and dancing around them. This was definitely not the magical experience I recalled from my last visit, but better than nothing.
However, at the time of this article, Disney is starting to phase socially distanced fireworks back into the park, but still is not doing the big end of day parade or the meet and greets. Also, the security guards would not let us take off our masks for a family photo in front of the castle, even though no one was even close to us. However, they did not try to enforce social distancing in the lines and while they had places to get hand sanitizer throughout the park, not one of them had any in them all day. Another issue during Covid times at Disney is that they would not allow us to go into the restaurants to order our food and instead we had to order through an app. The app was not working well and it took well over an hour for us to get our food and it was only mediocre. By then we were all starving and grumpy so that was a very frustrating experience. I would recommend that you just find the hot dog stand and save your time and money. We did enjoy that both Disney and Universal have apps with a map and estimated wait times for each ride. I found that the times listed were fairly accurate. This helped us to know when to run over to a line with a short wait time, or to take turns with long and short lines so that the kids could have some fun before the next long wait. We arrived at the park at opening and left at closing, and spent about $700 for tickets plus another $150 on food and souvenirs that day. Come prepared to spend the cash! However, one way to save money is to skip the gift shop in the park and instead find one outside the park. We found some great items very cheap outside the park. While it was a very expensive day, each one of my kids came up to me at some point in the day to give me a heartfelt thank you for bringing them to Disney World, and that made it all worth it to me.
On Wednesday, we headed over to Universal’s Island of Adventure! This park was amazing and was our favorite. We had virtually no lines all day and were able to ride our favorite rides over and over. Many of Universal’s rides lines are also just designed to move very quickly which we loved. No one wants to spend half their day in line.
My youngest son was in heaven at Marvel’s Super Hero Island, Spiderman and Captain America were there for photo ops and they joked around with my son and he loved it. Plus, there was another amazing Harry Potter area for my oldest son who loved the books! Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey was our favorite ride overall, it’s basically a 4D roller coaster. I highly recommend you visit this park if you go to Orlando, this just really is a great time to go with the limited capacity and low crowds.
We ate at Three Broomsticks in the Harry Potter area for lunch and I enjoyed my Shepherds Pie. My kids particularly enjoyed all the water rides in this park. We all got soaked and a little chilly, but for a few dollars you can get into the people dryers and warm up and at least get the drying process started! Warn your little ones not to start getting undressed when they get in there like mine did🤣. It did not dry us all the way so I’d save these rides for the end of the day so you can head back afterwards.
Once Thursday rolled around, we were pretty pooped from all the walking and took a day off from the theme parks to hit the beach. We drove out to Cocoa Beach for the day and just spent the day relaxing and playing the sand. The water was pretty chilly at this time of year and it was windy, but my kids still enjoyed the water, and I enjoyed working on a tan.
We found a great restaurant called Coconuts on the Beach and walked over for lunch. We sat on the patio so we could enjoy the ocean breeze and views. The food and adult beverages were wonderful and we had a great time laughing and talking with each other.
On Friday, we took advantage of our Park Hopper Pass and early admission with Universal. We started out at Islands of Adventure and rode the newest and most popular ride there, Hagrid’s Motorbike Adventure, it was awesome! Times like this I’m glad my kids have no fear. Its a good idea to get to this one before the park opens to the public because it always has a long line. Then we took the Hogwarts Express train over to Universal Studios and went on all the rides that we missed before. My oldest two kids went on their first adult roller coaster! We had some pizza at Louie’s Italian Restaurant and it was delish, and had to go on the Jimmy Fallon ride a couple more times because we thought it was so silly and fun. We got there at 9am and my kids and husband stayed all the way till close at 7pm! I was able to take the bus back to the hotel early and get some R&R when I got worn out.
Saturday was our last day and we had to head home. Ever since, my kids ask at least once a week when we can go back and often say this was the best trip we ever took. We spent about $4000 on this trip but I got some travel agent discounts and flight prices are starting to go up so I’d plan for a budget of approximately $5000 to do a similar trip for a family of 5. It was a busy but very memorable trip and those memories will last a lifetime! If you’d like help planning your trip to Disney or Universal, contact me at Knoll It All Travel on Facebook!
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